Do you recall what happened on September 11, 2001? Forget about it. Blood under the bridge. Both this corrupt administration and its even-more-corrupt Republican opponents have decided to forgive Al Qaeda.
Obama keeps reiterating that he intends to fight ISIS while supporting the "moderates" who oppose Bashar Assad of Syria. But there are no moderates -- at least, none with any muscles.
(Even if there were, we have no right to attempt regime change in Syria. Assad may be a dictator, but he's still preferable to the despicable creeps who run Saudi Arabia. For one thing, Assad has always pursued a policy of tolerance for Christians and other religious minorities. The same cannot be said for our Saudi "friends.")
Obama's desperation to maintain the illusion of a "moderate" opposition to Assad requires redefining the word "moderate" to include -- I kid you not -- Al Qaeda.
With no audible complaints from the right, this administration now includes the Nusra Front among the "moderates" who oppose Assad. Nusra is Al Qaeda's Syrian branch. And they have a history of playing nasty -- just like ISIS.
All of this talk of a rebranded Nusra is a silly, transparent ploy which should fool no-one who has an IQ in the triple-digit range. Nusra may be considered "moderate" only in the same sense that Christina Hendricks' figure may be considered boyish.
The bloodthirsty maniacs of Nusra are getting American weapons and food as we speak. As the video embedded above makes clear, the CIA has been giving support to this Al Qaeda offshoot for quite a while now.
Moon of Alabama reveals that our Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, applies the "moderate" label to any anti-Assad fighter who does not swear allegiance to ISIS.
I'm not kidding. No hyperbole. Clapper actually said these words:
Moderate these days is increasingly becoming anyone who is not affiliated with ISIL.As M of A summarizes:
A "rebranded" Jabhat al-Nusra would of course still fight the Syrian government as its primary enemy. Destroying the Syrian government is also the primary aim of the Wahhabi government of Qatar. New-Nusra would fight the Islamic State only after having secured enough resources and geography to be able to expand further. Its ideological essence would not change and its aim in the end would be to create its own version of an Islamic state.This is why I cannot support the calls for the use of American combat troops against ISIS. There already is a professional military doing combat with ISIS -- the Syrian army. It's their fight. Unless and until Obama gives up this sick dream of regime change, unless and until we decide to fight with Assad rather than against him, we cannot be a force for good in the region.
Washington's Blog adds another pertinent point.
Remember the sarin gas attacks in a suburb of Damascus back in 2013? Remember how the administration (led by John Kerry) tried to convince the world that Assad ordered the attacks? Remember the scores of teevee pundits who bellowed for war against Assad? Remember how the American people, wisely suspecting that something fishy was happening, did not heed that call for war? Finally, do you recall how we all learned -- months later -- that the American intelligence community had pointed the finger at the rebels, not at Assad?
I hope you remember that great drama, because this blog -- and many other blogs -- devoted much attention to it at the time. And guess what...? Sy Hersh reports that the true perpetrator of those sarin attacks was Nusra.
On 20 June analysts for the US Defense Intelligence Agency issued a highly classified five-page ‘talking points’ briefing for the DIA’s deputy director, David Shedd, which stated that al-Nusra maintained a sarin production cell: its programme, the paper said, was ‘the most advanced sarin plot since al-Qaida’s pre-9/11 effort’. (According to a Defense Department consultant, US intelligence has long known that al-Qaida experimented with chemical weapons, and has a video of one of its gas experiments with dogs.)
Last May, more than ten members of the al-Nusra Front were arrested in southern Turkey with what local police told the press were two kilograms of sarin. In a 130-page indictment the group was accused of attempting to purchase fuses, piping for the construction of mortars, and chemical precursors for sarin. Five of those arrested were freed after a brief detention.Get the picture? These guys are supposed to be our new buddies. These guys are the ones that Clapper now calls moderates.
In 2013, the sarin attacks were considered vile enough to justify war, because our mendacious media told us to blame Bashar Assad. Now we know that Nusra is the likely culprit. Suddenly, we are supposed to forget that the sarin attacks ever occurred. When was the last time you heard mention of those attacks from this administration, or even from Fox News and the "red state" blogs? The reaction is the same all across the political spectrum: "Sarin? What sarin?"
By the way, Syrian Girl is starting to disappoint me. She keeps wasting time and energy on inanity like "Gamergate" (!!) while the country she should one day lead continues to go to hell.
7 comments:
The US was working with aQ in Libya a few years ago, too. And before that with the Iranian branch. So you might not have thought it in 2001, but by 2004 it should have been obvious.
For that matter they had obviously been working together before 9/11 in Afghanistan and Yugoslavia and so on.
Syrian Girl seems to be expanding her audience, as I've seen her mentioned by Gamergaters who wouldn'y otherwise have encountered her. She's on the right side of the issue, and though you may fin it trivial it's something she cares about and where she's probably got more chance of having an impact than on the Syrian war.
Stephen, I admit that I have not closely followed the gamergate thing. Not my area. Even if she is on the right side of that issue, the fact remains: During the past month or two, I've written much more about Syria, the Ukraine and cognate issues than she has written.
That's wrong.
It's doubly wrong because she's on YouTube and thus reaches a wider audience. It's not as though anyone wants to see MY lens-shattering mug on YouTube. People want to see HER -- and who can blame them?
So I wish she would go back to addressing the issues of war and peace. What can be more important than the great question of war and peace?
Besides, in one of her recent diatribes, she made an absurd crack about video game makers being influenced by "cultural Marxism." Although I stopped playing games years ago, I have met a few people who make them. In fact, I even worked for a computer games company. (This was a LONG time ago, when the industry was very young and very different.) Bottom line, that's not an industry likely to attract anyone who gives a damn about Marxism.
The fact that she used that term indicates that she has let the Alex Jonesians seep into her thinking. That's troubling.
There's no reason Syrian Girl has to be nothing but a Syrian girl. You talk about art, she talks about the greater form of art known as computer games. Seemingly people want to watch youtube videos about the same subject too.
That's not to say that it's more important than issues of war and peace, but war and peace isn't the only important thing, and it's fine to talk about things that aren't important too.
As for cultural marxism, that's not an exclusively Jonesian term. Computer games certainly seem like an unlikely thing to be hijacked by ideologues pushing feminism and political correctness, but it's happening nonetheless. Hasn't had much effect on the games themselves, or anything that requires technical skill, but it's had a chilling effect on games and programming conferences (see "donglegate") and caused gamergate by corrupting gaming journalism.
I think of gamergate as being like an 80s movie, not least because the journalist side have taken to publicly championing bullying an using nerd as an insult. Now, bullying and video-game journalism might not be of the same macrocosmic importance as war and peace, but they're still important issues.
The Global War On Terror has been a massive fraud from day one. The US needs terrorist organizations to exist, first to destabilize non-compliant countries and then to provide a pretext for humanitarian wars, which end with the installation of puppet regimes that facilitate the looting of natural resources by multinational corporations.
This is an old game. In the four decades after WWII it was the omnipresent Communist menace that fueled every covert and overt US war. Now it is the terrorists, with the Russkies again being added back into the mix. At the age of 64, I have to tell you that it is really disillusioning to watch the American people getting played for suckers, again and again.
It's said that addicts need to hit rock-bottom before they can start turning their lives around. When will the American people hit rock-bottom and start turning what's left of this country around?
Stephen, I know that Maram will turn her formidable skills to whatever issue pleases her. I don't like it when people tell me what to do, and I won't make that mistake regarding her.
But my interests are what they are. And I don't care about games.
That said -- believe me, I get sick of writing about war. There are thousands of more enticing topics. It seems as though world events are forcing a lot of writers to address topics that they'd rather not address.
To her credit Syrian Girl has done a better job of explaining GamerGate than anyone else, but that's not saying much. Given the crisis in Syria, it does seem a diversion, particularly since the significance of GamerGate has never been made clear to most people.
My main concern with Syrian Girl is whether she is sufficiently skeptical of some of the shows and publications she associates herself with from time to time.
Might the US have cooperated with AQ or some other Islamists in the assassination of Boris Nemtsov too?
I doubt it. Why? Because that assassination just isn't as important in Russia as it's made out in the west to be. It'll have little effect in that country, where everyone knows all leading politicians sit on some billionaire's payroll, if they aren't already billionaires themselves, and that they all made their bones years ago. In the local language, democracy (демократия) is 'shittocracy' (деремократия). Nemtsov was mixed up businesswise with Poroshenko - YAWN! He wasn't some Martin Luther King figure standing for 'people's rights' - or teenagers copying whatever music they want, or whatever's considered groovy in the 2010s.
If people think the KGB lost its influence in the anti-Soviet fascist Russian, Ukrainian and Baltic scenes, I'd really like to know how they managed to do that, what with their previously pervasive influence and all those files they had on everyone at the time of the 1991 regime changes.
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